Heretofore, in most article packaging operations, a plurality of manual operations have been required and usually the articles to be packaged will vary widely in number, weight and volume so that in businesses that ship a variety of products, a plurality of different sizes of preformed shipping containers are required. This number of different shipping containers can be extremely large when a variety of packages and articles are being shipped, and a large inventory of different size boxes, containers or container blanks is required and the particular shipper enclosure is manually selected for size and than has the articles to be shipped manually placed therein. Furthermore, an appreciable amount of storage space is required for the large number of packaging units, shipping containers or boxes that must be stored and appreciable inventory costs are incurred in these prior packaging operations.
Manual operations of a repetitive nature in packaging operations can be quite costly as well as being tedious to perform. Hence, any automation that can be provided in packaging actions is quite desirable while any reduction in inventory costs and storage space provides savings of packaging costs.